Renee Marquis had a dream, a vision really, to open a chain of family restaurants.

To give customers healthy, tasty, home-cooked fare — with lots of fruits and vegetables — and packed with down-home Newfoundland goodness and everything else she wasn’t offering in her day job as the owner of 10 KFC (aka Kentucky Fried Chicken) restaurants scattered around the province.

The more she thought about this dream, the more she was tormented by it.

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She couldn’t sleep. And when she wasn’t sleeping, she couldn’t stop thinking about the arc of her life, about spending another decade doing the same old deep-fried thing, a thing she didn’t feel quite right about doing anymore, knowing what we know about the health merits of fast food, but something she couldn’t just up and quit.

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“Colonel Sanders’ family and my family were personal friends,” Ms. Marquis says.

“I have pictures of myself as a little girl sitting on the Colonel’s knee eating a chicken leg. Mildred Ruggles, his daughter, was like a godmother to me. I got Christmas presents, birthday presents and just-because presents from her.

“She stayed with us whenever she came to town. She was at my wedding. To walk away from this brand is a big, big decision for me.”

Ms. Marquis’ father, Leo, an American airmen, fell in love with a Newfoundlander before lassoing the island’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in 1960 — seven years before the George Cohon brought McDonald’s to Canada — after his wife spotted an ad in a trade magazine.

Crispy Southern-style chicken made with the Colonel’s secret recipe became the Marquis family enterprise. The business grew and grew, and now the sole heiress is letting it all go.

Not by selling out to the highest bidder, though there were plenty of them knocking on her door, but by flying the Colonel’s coop, letting her franchise license expire and leaping from a fried chicken bucket into a brave new culinary world.

“We have beautiful wild produce in Newfoundland, we’re surrounded by the ocean. I want to give people a fresh option, not just haul something out of a freezer or open up a tin and charge premium price for junk food.

“Newfoundland women bottle rabbit stew. And it’s delicious, and in France they’d be calling it lapin, but here we’d say go check the snare line and this is what we are having for dinner. We are valid in the food world, let me tell you, Newfoundland women, oh my god, how they can cook.”

Paul Daly for the National Post

The restaurant makeover will see the KFC franchises reinvented as “Oppy’s Diner” — that’s Poppy’s, without the “P” — in a nod to the proprietor’s father.

The first outlet will open in Carbonear at the end of August, with nine more to follow. The décor will be cozy, the table tops painted with the old-time recipes, the vibe: pure Newfoundland.

“I want people to think they’re going to dinner at their grandfather’s place in the country,” Ms. Marquis says.

Part of her desire to make a change is there is seldom any change or variety in the fast food world.

A bucket of KFC in downtown Toronto tastes exactly the same as a bucket in Deer Lake, NL. It’s also equally crispy, greasy, sinfully crunchy and loaded with sodium, fat, cholesterol and a rollcall of other heart-attack risks that were tugging at Ms. Marquis’ conscience.

I want to give people a fresh option, not just haul something out of a freezer or open up a tin and charge premium price for junk food

“I will say this,” she says. “Kentucky Fried Chicken is fresh chicken, not frozen. It is prepared in the store. We use canola oil and our shortening management is the industry leader.

“And having said that, I will say this: I have a five-month old daughter. Do I want her eating chicken fingers? No.”

But fish and brewis? Homemade hamburgers? Meatloaf every Monday? Aunty Louise’s prime rib with Yorkshire pudding on Wednesdays? Tennessee barbecued ribs — made using her mother’s recipe — salads with wild Newfoundland blueberries, fresh fish, cornbread like your grandma used to make, chowders and soups, and comfort food galore and, of course, vegetables, for about the same price as trip to the drive through?

How about it, Newfoundland?

Much will change, but not everything.

“We are going to have French fries,” Ms. Marquis says with a laugh. “Because it’s a diner, you have to — but they’ll be fresh from the store. No more of this frozen crap.”

No more KFC. The Colonel has left the building. Renee Marquis is on the move.

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